I know the word normies may have weird connotations, but I just mean that, regular everyday people.
I’ve been enjoying Lemmy a lot and even recommended it to a few close friends who are working in tech. But I would like Lemmy to be way bigger, maybe have those makefriends communities like reddit has, be it gaming friends, just for chatting, for voicecalls, etc etc…
But I also wonder, could growing Lemmy indiscriminately be a bad thing? As you relax filters and barriers to entry, yes, more people can come in, but I have a feeling the quality of the people might go down aswell.
Is a clique-like platform what Lemmy is supposed to be like? Or is it supposed to try and absorb as much users as possible and be just a user-managed user-owned reddit alternative with no ads and less censorship?
I believe the answer may lie somewhere in the middle, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, as I’m a total newbie on here.
(Also I understand private dms on Lemmy are not secure, but you can keep the idea of the “r4r” community and just drop a matrix or session link in dms, not perfect as the admins can be what username you sent out, but at least it ends there)
If you hand made this one rn you are a pretty cool guy, but if you had it saved up and ready to use you’re based.
If I could get on a upvote loan to upvote it twice I would, this is sick haha
I’d take “normies” any day over people who classify others as “normies”.
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Why is that? Is a tag like that something you consider a bad thing? Like calling someone a geek?
Yeah, to me it’s a tag that I consider bad. It makes you sound like you’re better than others. I suppose it comes from 4chan users referring to non-users as normies, while being pretty terrible themselves. (edit: I make this sound like I think the term originated from 4chan - I don’t, just my perception of the word)
Once you interact with “regular everyday people”, you’ll realize most of them are far from regular. Someone who’ll come here asking stupid questions about using lemmy and computer in general might turn out to be a history fanatic who can enrich the community with incredible depth. Or they might have a weird disease, find a community around it and provide support for others in the same situation.
Obviously there are dumb, boring and insane people. Many of them we can distinguish from the .ml ending. But I’m happy to tolerate even them, who knows what they’re going through.
The only kind of people I don’t want here are nazis or billionaire apologists. Fuck them.
I understand, that’s why i quoted out the term and put the first line in, but I might be wrong in how I tried and explain my thought process around this whole thing.
With apologies to the mod team, I do agree with you in that we could tolerate a more diverse group of users even if for the sake of having more numbers, and yes, fuck billionaires, been seeing that guy from the UK pop up more on youtube, yk Gary Stevenson (gary’s economics) doubling down the thing everybody already knows, rich people get tax breaks, and so much passive income that they buy everything so prices rise and living conditions get worse for ordinary people
Ok, so I admit I didn’t read your initial post with enough thought to see the actual intent, and so was a bit aggressive with my comments.
With apologies to the mod team
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this? Nevertheless, with more users there would be more need for modding, I hope they’ll be able to handle the increasing user base. Early days reddit was able to do it, whatever that should mean.
I mean exactly what you’re saying there, more users (non-handpicked but just inviting a ton of people you know) means more work for the admins, just that.
And don’t worry about it, intent has always been hard to read over text
It’s a form of exclusion, of othering people. I understand that may not be the intent, but it labels them as “not like us”, with contextual hints that we’re probably better off without them.
You didn’t get it wrong at all, that was the intent behind it, that not all people are healthy for a community, this wouldn’t be ALL “normies” though, but a subset of them (disruptive people), you probably have met quite a few of those in mainstream social media.
And while not all of them are “normies”, there’s been a long history of outsiders getting into geek groups and then either shaming or criticizing the hobbies of nerdy/geeky people due to “not getting it”, I do think you should exclude certain people from certain communities, like for example, not allowing child molesters and neo-nazis to hang around.
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It’s nice of you to try and get an ego boost out of me (shouldn’t even need to tell you, but, Ad Hominem? really? The age of my account doesn’t have anything to do with what I say)
But go ahead, point out where in my post I said anything about telling other people what to do? My post was made out of curiosity of what other people thought about this, framed as a question, and showcasing some of my preliminary thoughts about both options, if you can find a place in my post where I tell others how they should run Lemmy I’ll apologize, I don’t have any issues with apologizing, hell, I’ll take down the post even.
If not, stfu, you’re just being an ass for literally no reason, if you can’t point it out, then you are just talking shit, and it seems that in your looong history of this account (9months on Lemmy) you didn’t even learn how to construct a proper argument.
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Straw man now lol, I point out you engaged in an ad hominem fallacy and you call me a victim cause that’s way easier for you than to adress that I called you out on using flawed logic, that’t not a response to the point I made, again, the age of my account is not a factor in what I choose to say about a topic, it’s like saying you can’t have an opinion on abortion because you are not a woman, or an opinion on public universities because you went to a private one.
Or are you gonna argue that it’s somehow “wrong” to not want a really cool new thing you found to prosper in the best way possible? I’m not the boss of anyone, not buiding up any cults or gathering followers of any kind to follow my orders, I’m just a guy, sharing his thoughts on something, and asking more experienced people on their thoughts… If you think that’s a bad thing…
I don’t see why we would want to gatekeep the fediverse. If more people decided to use it over centralized social media, I think that’d be a positive development.
And as you know, the fediverse is far from homogeneous. I expect there will always be some very big general purpose “normie” instances like lemmy.world, and smaller, more niche ones for specific communities.
Big agree with all that. Also, I’m curious what OP might mean by this:
As you relax filters and barriers to entry
Does that just mean the usual improving of interface & features over time?
In some way, yes, but I don’t think UI is as important, I like the UI we have, simple, sleek, easy to use, I mean more about communities and topics, the top communities in lemmy world are: tech, politics/news(sometimes news about politics), memes, and ask lemmy, then you have “games”.
But none of these communities follows the r4r format of reddit, in which you post to directly connect to other people, like broadly what I’m saying, is that most of the things here are “news-like” in the sense that interaction is more limited, I think having a big community for meeting people incentivizes a ton more connections (people in r4r reddits post often and read the forum often, because they are looking for friends/hookups/study partners etc etc)
With the filters and barriers I mean inviting people in, any type of people, advertising Lemmy more over the internet and I don’t like using this word but as I can’t think of an alternative right now “recruiting” people without filtering them out.
Timmy from reddit may be super right wing and close-minded, he might be a +1 as a user, but if he starts to troll and disrupt due to not being able to discuss topics in a mature manner with people with opposite ideologies to his own, I don’t think his addition to the community would be a good idea, accepting people like this (this is a scale ofc, not a binary thing) adds more users in, but creates some moderation issues imo.
I like the UI we have, simple, sleek, easy to use
I want to point out that the UI can very widely when hooked up to the Lemmy side of the FV. It can look significantly different from PF or Lemmy desktop and all the various apps that hook in, with different kinds of features and abilities.
With Reddit declaring war on 3rd-party apps, the user experience there is either their godawful in-house app or browser mode old / new. Just for comparison’s sake.
…in which you post to directly connect to other people…
I’m pretty sure that a big part of that perception simply stems from Reddit’s userbase being so much bigger. The ability to connect is also endemic in the Lemmy / PF structure, it just doesn’t have the number of users to facilitate that.
With the filters and barriers I mean inviting people in, any type of people, advertising Lemmy more over the internet and I don’t like using this word but as I can’t think of an alternative right now “recruiting” people without filtering them out.
AFAIK all that’s pretty much going to be down to word of mouth / etc, as always.
Timmy from reddit may be super right wing and close-minded…
People like that have been a thing forever from what I’ve seen, and indeed I think there’s a certain bias for non-ideal users who couldn’t fit in to Reddit joining the FV and other places. It many ways it makes things a bit harder and weirder here.
advertising Lemmy more over the internet
That’s never going to happen effectively. Advertising campaigns cost money, which is something that open source projects are normally short of
Sorry, I think I made a mistake there, I didn’t mean advertising like running ads, but mouth to mouth, basically yapping about lemmy to a bunch of the people you know/chat to if other social media, like a shotgun approach to see if anyone ends up here after you talk to a ton of people.
The fediverse is about offering an alternative to the monopoly power and political control of the large corporate sites. The more people are here, the less control those have. That is a good thing and far more important than any kind of elitist snobbery people here like to indulge in.
I’m perfectly content with letting Lemmy grow organically. If it achieves a wider user base, great, but I’m also fine if it doesn’t. I think any attempts to deliberately make it more palatable to a wider audience should be heavily scrutinized, though. This isn’t to say all changes such an audience would want are bad, or should be denied, but I’ve seen too many sites completely shit on the wants and needs of their existing users in order to have broader appeal, and I would rather avoid that.
Nice take, I can see how that could end up being a problem
Yes, I want to build up an alternative to big tech controlled social media so working class people can have our own voices magnified.
So you are going to stop censoring working class voices then?
I like that the fediverse is mostly a safe space for all sorts of minorities (especially queer/trans people and autistics). I’m pretty happy not having facists call me retarded and/or treat me like an idiot for being autistic and/or having leftist opinions (although I suspect this still happens here).
By becoming mainstream, the platform will be flooded with nationalist propaganda and hate speech.
Also: There’s still some fuckery around Lemmy.world and the communist instances. Just let people have political ideology. They aren’t harming anyone.
Normies flood in growth is exciting for awhile, they drown out and dismantle out the core group by sheer volume, they take over things start to feel like every other social site, ???, profit, corpo takeover, enshitification, decline.
Hopefully Lemmy is built different enough to break this process, but so was everything else until it made someone money.
Depends. I wish there were more normal people here myself. Because I’m not an extremist looking to live in a hugbox and I enjoy diversity. I genuinely take joy in learning other people’s thoughts and perspectives on topics when they are expressed in a peaceful and thoughtful way. But I’m in a minority.
As for needing to ‘grow userbase’. Not really, but if you want more content and more niches you need more users, plain and simple. Most folks here miss there niche communities from reddit.
Agree 100%, but when I mean normies I’m not only referring to people that like football over retro DOS game crt plugins discussion forums.
I mean like people who don’t really engage in that much critical thinking in general and just want to hang out without much thought, like yk, reddit people (ofc not all reddit users are like this, but if you ever tried to have any type of argument you know what I’m talking about, if you even need a refresher on your logical falacies for a class, reddit’s always got your back)
According to that definition, IMO, lemmy is already overwhelmingly normie.
Whenever I see critical discussion here, it gets harassed, reported, and the thread is locked/removed. Because much of the userbase here is incapable of thinking and reacts with utterly hostility towards anything that isn’t part of their far-left dogmatisms about capitalism evil, communism good, etc. Any arguement or evidence that doesn’t support that belief is labeled ‘fallacy’ or ‘propaganda’.
Real. Also: AI bad. If you think that AI is actually useful you’ll be downvoted to hell and below.
That sounds awful, I really hope it’s not a “forever thing”, Idk where I stand when it comes to politics, but I feel it would be stupid to dismiss an ENTIRE ideology and say “nothing inside of this box labeled capitalism/communism will ever be useful”.
I’d like for people to be civil and discuss the virtues of X or Y policies inside an ideology, kinda hate that if you are a leftie you can’t be anti abortion.
Like who decided that? I don’t like the idea of happy-meal-ideologies where if you subscribe to a particular ideology you are opted in to all that’s inside it and its frowned upon for you to deviate from it.
people do. human nature is to be tribal and the tribe is formed based on inherited belief structures. it’s feelings.
university used to be about learning to think and challenging beliefs, but that’s being flushed down the toilet because administrations now want to protect student’s feelings above all else. so now a lot of university grads have gone through 4-6 years of academic training without ever thinking critically about themselves or their beliefs, and most of them seem to now come out with much more rigid belief structure than they went in with (radicalized).
If I was charging as much as private unis charge per student I’d try my hardest to protect their feelings too lol
A rising tide lifts all ships. A larger userbase doesn’t just mean “normies”, it means a wider variety of demographics, fandoms, and views.
And that in turn means that somewhere in the large userbase will be more people who match my freak. The main thing I used Reddit for was niche hobbies and fandoms, but over here I suspect I might be the only person on this platform who’s into my specific hyperfixations. If the userbase was large enough, there might be a chance to try and establish communities for some of those things.
But perhaps most importantly, I want this place to grow to prove that alternatives to the corporate social media platforms can succeed. And in order to do that, we do need “normies”, we need to pull them away from those corporate platforms.
Fair point, might invite a few more people then!
You’re asking this on .world, the normie instance. .world is the watered down version of lemmy.
But to answer your question, yes, ideally all people should move to foss versions of corpo software, if only to devalue digital data trading and advertisement space. Yes that means more instances going further right wing, and some instances choosing to no longer federate with the larger, more ‘normie’ ones; but the overall good to society is worth the cost.
With a user base so small as Lemmy has right now you kind of have to bunch up together to try and get some interaction going, as you grow, you can afford to spread out more.
No use in being in a cool super niche Lemmy instance/community if it has like 50 monthtly users and one post every 2 months (you can argue it MIGHT be worth it, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s better for a community to be big enough, as for it to have daily if not hourly posts and MORE interactivity than the other way around)
.world has the same userbase as the other instances except they’re center-left instead of far-left. And that’s not sufficient to make them into normies.
How can an instance be “watered down” if most of them federate? Does world block a lot of other instances?
While .world does tend to block a lot of instances, watering down would in this case be a problem with over-federation. .world tends to host the most popular communities, which then is a self-feeding cycle that increasingly centralizes user share on .world, which then produces more content than native communities, then making .world communities more popular, and so on.
It produces much more average (to American and Euro-centric tastes) posts, while also being the defacto instance/community for a particular topic. Watering down what could be much more specialized topic posting and discussions.
A lot of normies won’t be using Lemmy or fediverse in general. It is not as addictive or personalised as the mainstream social media. Plus an avg joe doesn’t know whan an instance is. If one instance starts to get too many users, it might just shut down sign ups.
Edit: Lemmy also doesn’t have an “official” app. So it adds even more friction. Yeah a few users might get excited and use it for a couple of days and then just go back to reddit.
I don’t know why anyone uses apps for any of this. It’s literally just websites. Not to yuck in anyone.
I used an app back in the reddit days but I find lemmy doesn’t have all the cruft that I hate, so I just use the default web UI.
Being comfortable with websites is a very western thing (and I guess that is also a minority in smartphones). In countries like India, a huge majority of the people’s first personal computer was a smartphone. They either use the google app to browse the web or use other apps. No one bothers to use a web browser. It is still the case today. A lot of people don’t use a desktop here.
Interesting, I had no idea. I use my browser on my phone. Actually even when I was using a 10 year old phone, I found I had to use browser for everything because no apps would support my old Android OS.
To me the browser always seemed the more accessible option, but I’m used to using a browser from desktop it’s true.
Nah, I talk to the public for a living. Give me a the high-effort weirdos here, please.
I would rather have “normies” then the terminally online divorced from reality late 30 something weirdos with opinions that range from “yikes” to “please keep 100 miles away from a school at all times” users currently making up the majority.
More niche interests, less politics. A niche community could move to Lemmy instead of hosting their own forum for example. Either hosting their own instance or using an existing one.
